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SHAMANISM/CATHOLICISM: SCHISM and SYNTHEISM in SELECTED NOVELS of LOUISE ERDRICH THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of Te SHAMANISM/CATHOLICISM: SCHISM AND SYNTHEISM IN SELECTED NOVELS OF LOUISE ERDRICH THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of Texas State University-San Marcos in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of LITERATURE by Paul Warren Camden, B.A. San Marcos, Texas December 2011 SHAMANISM/CATHOLICISM: SCHISM AND SYNTHEISM IN THE NOVELS OF LOUISE ERDRICH Committee Members Approved: ______________________________ Robin Cohen, Chair ______________________________ Teya Rosenberg, Member ______________________________ Daniel Lochman, Member Approved: ________________________________ J. Michael Willoughby Dean of the Graduate College COPYRIGHT by Paul Warren Camden 2011 FAIR USE AND AUTHOR’S PERMISSION STATEMENT Fair Use This work is protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States (Public Law 94-553, section 107). Consistent with fair use as defined in the Copyright Laws, brief quotations from this material are allowed with proper acknowledgment. Use of this material for financial gain without the author’s express written permission is not allowed. Duplication Permission As the copyright holder of this work I, Paul Warren Camden, authorize duplication of this work, in whole or in part, for educational or scholarly purposes only. For my father, Jack Warren Camden ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Robin Cohen for her guidance and encouragement along the circuitous and protracted course this project has taken, and I would especially like to thank Dr. Cohen for her infinite patience with her student. She has given so much time and energy to fortify my fragile constitution, and I can only feebly express how grateful I am. Know too, that I will miss beyond measure our conversations. I thank Dr. Teya Rosenberg and Dr. Daniel Lochman for their significant contributions to my academic and intellectual development throughout the course of my studies. Their mentorship has meant more to me than I can fully express. I would like also to thank Dr. Paul Cohen for his timely and reliable mentoring and for his too great effort influencing the culmination of this project. Finally, I will thank Nancy Wilson, Patsy Pohl, Karen Bryson, and all the faculty and staff of the English Department who have contributed to my success and enjoyment of this master’s program. Thank you all. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................... vi PREFACE .................................................................................................................. viii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION: SYNCRETISM / SYNTHEISM ............................. 1 II. MOSES: SYNTHEISM OF REPUDIATION ....................................... 23 III. PAULINE/LEOPOLDA: SYNTHEISM OF RENUNCIATION ........ 34 IV. FATHER DAMIEN: SYNTHEISM OF TRANSCENDENCE ........... 48 V. CONCLUSION .................................................................................... 59 VI. WORKS CITED .................................................................................... 63 vii PREFACE When I was about four years old, my Uncle Bud picked me up from daycare around lunchtime one day. I remember seeing his light blue VW pull into the parking lot. He had a Beetle that was a few years older than the green one my father had driven. I suppose the teacher must have known he was coming and had me look out the front window for him. That part I don’t remember, but I do remember the excitement I felt when I saw Uncle Bud get out of the car and walk toward me. I didn’t know why he was there, and in my child’s mind, I doubt I even wondered why he was there; I just knew he was and that I was happy for it. I remember getting into the car, and in that sketchy sleight of hand that memory plays, the next thing I remember is our walking slowly by the animals’ cages at the zoo. I’m unsure how long we had been there, but I recall seeing apes and big cats before the emotion hit me. I suppose I’ve always been quite sensitive, but likely at that point in time, only a few short months since my father ‚passed away‛—as everyone kept telling me, whatever that meant—I was probably more so than usual. I cried. My uncle’s face, raised eyebrows, pleading eyes passed before me, and then I looked at the cat again, a leopard, its spotted skin reflecting my own, and the viii ix cat’s face, raised eyebrows, hollow eyes, struck another chord in my tiny soul. I began sobbing inconsolably. Uncle Bud took my hand and gently led me away from there. Vividly I remember feeling that the animals, especially the cats, were sad, that they longed for something, that they too were crying but without tears. I gave them mine. That impression has remained with me these many years, and I’ve spent significant time thinking about that one day and how it has affected me. I tend to notice right away when that same feeling arises, and I will sharpen my attention on a person or a situation whenever it does. Perhaps science could explain this feeling away quite neatly as a projection or as a chemical imbalance or as a sentimental journey, but I rather like to think that despite some rational explanation, there nevertheless exists within us an intuitive sense that is just as valid as our other five. So after much thought over many years, I’ve come to believe what happened that day is as simple as my sensing the leopard trapped in that zoo, an environment completely unnatural to him, longing for freedom, pleading in his soul to once again run free in the jungle and struggle for food and cope with starvation and compete for mates and contend with insects and not just be alive but really live. Foolish though it may be, I cannot escape the overwhelming feeling of that day, and I cannot abide any other explanation. x Last fall a similar impression struck me at the powwow in Austin. I’m unsure what I expected, attending a gathering of Native Americans held at a coliseum in a major city rather than in a tiny pueblo in the desert, but what greeted me was nevertheless surprising. I was reminded of my paternal grandmother, who for most of her life quilted, a craft she had learned from her mother. Although she owned a sewing machine and knew well how to use it, she insisted that hand-sewn quilts possessed a quality that those made on a machine could not match, and despite her severe arthritis, she continued to make at least one quilt a year well into her eighties. In her quilts, one notices the absence of uniformity in the patterns and in the material and in the stitching—uneven here, crooked there—and this nuance, far from being an indication of imperfection, gives the quilt a personality and, dare I say, a soul. It is this soul that was in part missing at the powwow. But there was something else missing also. The regalia the dancers wore, although bright and beautiful, was, upon close examination, fashioned from manufactured material and decorated with plastic beads. It struck me that even Native American ceremonial dress, although assembled in the US, was made in China, from whence the cloth and the beads surely originated. Hand-woven material dyed with roots or berries xi and carefully crafted quill work were absent, and as I was confronted with the commercialization of an entire culture, I began to sense that old feeling again. To me there also seemed to be great longing among this crowd, a collective void inherited from mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers, and the embodiment of that longing consisted in the meager attempts to imitate the material products representative of a thoroughly ancient culture, much like new habitats found at contemporary zoos create the illusion of natural surroundings yet fail to capture the essence of genuine freedom. I was sad. I left. This sense is what draws me to the works of Louise Erdrich. She doesn’t express it outright, but it’s there between the lines, coursing through the humor and the beauty and the poetry and the pain, an absolute chasm separating what was and what is. Perhaps she reveals a bit of sentimentality for the past or a bit of resentment for the present, both human tendencies and both justified, but nevertheless her writing is a poignant and an artful revelation of what is surely an intangible void underlying Native America in a post-colonial land. With this preface and in the following pages, I do not pretend to understand what it means to be Native American, nor do I wish to convey or even suggest a sympathetic viewpoint. But perhaps because, as C. G. Jung notes, ‚one can never possess a foreign land, because in foreign ground there live xii foreign ancestral spirits, and so those who are born there are incarnations of foreign spirits‛ (Wehr 233), or perhaps because my Irish blood is tinged with the faint familiarity of having been colonized, or perhaps simply because I was literally a red-headed stepchild, I do hope that on some level I can relate to a sentiment of losing one’s roots and one’s identity and living within the vacuum of that absence. I hope to do justice to the spirit of Erdrich’s writing. CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: SYNCRETISM / SYNTHEISM When two religious belief systems converge upon an individual, he or she faces a complex process of rejection, compromise, and/or assimilation of the contrasting theologies, which necessarily results in psychological upheaval. Subverting the very foundation of a society by imposing an entirely contrary belief system fractures an otherwise unified world view, and amid the resulting religious chaos, the individual suffers not only social but also psychological fragmentation. Such a schism arises in the works of Louise Erdrich as a cognitive dissonance that pervades the psyches of her characters. The germ of this ambivalence rests in the collective Anishinaabeg memory as the encroachment upon their religion by the Catholic Church, and the adaptive response to this encroachment consists in a continuum of syncretistic belief, thought, and action embodied in Erdrich’s characters.
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